I am President of Ceres, a nonprofit organization that leads a national coalition of investors, environmental organizations and other public interest groups working with companies to address sustainability challenges such as global climate change and water scarcity. I also direct the Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR), a group of over 100 institutional investors managing $10 trillion in assets focused on the business risks and opportunities of climate change.
Under my leadership, Ceres launched The 21st Century Corporation: The Ceres Roadmap for Sustainability, highlighting critical corporate environmental and social performance improvements for integrating sustainability across capital markets and the economy.

Why Environmental Policies Don't Kill Jobs

So let’s stop fiddling while the rest of the world sprints ahead in a competition that will only grow. As any VC will tell you, priming the pump for cutting-edge industries always has its share of failures and busts – let’s not single them out to score political points.

The 21st Century global economy will inevitably be powered by clean tech, and the millions of jobs it spawns elsewhere if not here. It’s past time to get moving on the policies we need to nurture it.

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I would respectfully point out that your article is about why we should push forward with clean technologies and has little to do with the issues of jobs lost due to the hand-in-hand penalties usually imposed on those jobs associated with the present energy technologies and the energies themselves. It avoids the real world realities of subsequent related increases in manufacturing and transportation cost incurred all the way back down to the individual employees paying more to get to work or cool and heat their homes and the effect on companies attempting to recoup these increases by various means to include scaling back on employee numbers.

Yor are wrong, wrong, wrong! I am 70 years old. As a child my family moved back and forth between near Norfold, VA, and Plymouth, NC, several times before moving to Florida. I guarantee you that the air is cleaner now than then. Having spent almost 9 years in the Far East, their air was dirty in the 60′s and much worse now. The air quality in Europe has improved since the 1960′s and my recent trip to Germany and Italy but not as good as the U.S.A. Some of the local Science Fair participants took air samples as various heights in the area and then examined the pollutants. They found that much originated in the Far East mostly China and Italy. No one really is against removing proven pollutants that adversely affect health and quality of life, but the EPA goes overboard by far. If 10 million dollars would remove 70% or a pollutant and it would cost 100 million dollars to remove 80%, they would go for the 80% although a 50% reduction would really solve the problem. You cannot remove 100% of anything because natural release would keep adding to the amtmoshpere or to the water, as appropiate. Agencies like the EPA, FDA and NLRP keep trying to find new scares to keep themselves in existence. Placing extremists in these agencies makes the problem even worse. Reason, not extremism, must rule.

This doesn’t pass the Econ 101 test. Let me walk you through it, Mindy. Free markets allocate resources most efficiently. This happens through a signaling mechanism called price, i.e., investment flows towards the greatest % return: return being the price of capital. All government intervention, no matter how noble and well-purposed, creates market distortions and, therefore, an inefficient allocation of resources. So, no matter how many jobs a boondoggle creates, it will always be fewer than would be created were that wealth to find its own best use. And, as if that weren’t bad enough, the government plays Investment Banker with our money; it “rewards friends” and “punishes enemies,” it’s the nature of power. And, it’s a quote from Barack Obama.

Put more succinctly: money that would have been efficiently allocated by the market is seized from us (or our children) and lavished on political (read: hare-brained) ideas, to benefit the well-connected while distorting the rational action of markets in which WE participate. Creating a quadruple-whammy of inefficiency, theft, corruption and uncertainty. To quote a great line voiced by Jack Nicholson: “go sell crazy somewhere else, we’re all stocked up here.”

“Two Citi Investment Research reports showed that boosting automobile fuel economy standards will boost automakers’ variable profits and sales – especially for the Detroit 3 – and also boost US-based suppliers of fuel-savings technologies. In fact, GM is already pushing to export Michigan-made Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrids to China, the world’s largest auto market, later this year.” Mindy, I am especially glad to see that you’ve cited these reports and others in embracing the President’s environmental job-related statements, for which the timing could not be more opportune or critical for the American public and the environment.